Yellow.ai, a conversational artificial intelligence start-up, has raised $20 million in a Series B round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Lightspeed India Partners.
Founded in 2015 by Raghavendra Kumar Ravinutala and Jaya Kishore Reddy, the company offers AI-powered conversational bots that can be deployed across multiple communication channels such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, and WhatsApp, and can be integrated with a company’s existing system of record and system of engagement.
“In less than three years, Yellow.ai has quickly established itself as a leader in conversational AI for the enterprise. We anticipate demand for the company’s platform to accelerate as consumer expectations of real-time conversations with their brands deepen,” said Amy Wu, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, in a statement.
The company said it would use the new funds to fuel international growth across the United States, Europe, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific. Yellow.ai will also invest further in product innovation including deepening multilingual voice bot capabilities, expanding enterprise integrations, and launching a developer marketplace for virtual assistants.
“We’ve seen huge demand for our conversational AI platform since the very beginning, achieving 5X growth in bookings, year over year, since 2017,” said Ravinutala, adding that the investment will help accelerate their research and development endeavors.
Capabilities and Presence
The engagements using the company’s bots can be carried in over 120 languages across voice and text.
Presently, the Yellow.ai platform is powering 30 million monthly conversations on chatbots, for more than 100 customers across the globe, such as Accenture, Bajaj Finance, Byjus, Dominos India, Flipkart, Grab, MG Motors, Royal Enfield, Spencer’s Retail, Tata AIG, and Xiaomi India.
The company said it has also forged deep go-to-market partnerships with Microsoft, TCS, WhatsApp, Facebook among others.
“One in every three companies globally is implementing conversational AI and chatbots—the pull is irreversible. Ever since we met the Yellow.ai team at our Lightspeed Extreme Entrepreneurs program in 2018, we have seen how the company has taken advantage of this market pull with its rapid time-to-value, transactional platform and multi-language support for global rollouts,” said Dev Khare, partner at Lightspeed India Partners.
Last year, the company had raised a $4 million Series A round from Lightspeed India Partners and some angel investors including the likes of Snapdeal co-founder Kunal Bahl and Limeroad co-founder Prashant Malik.
Tackling the Coronavirus Outbreak
With the ongoing Coronavirus outbreak disrupting everyday life, like many other start-ups, Yellow.ai, too, has stepped up to help.
In partnership with Facebook Messenger, the company has been appointed by the National Health Authority of India to provide chatbots to several state governments including Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, and Rajasthan, to assist with citizen engagement over WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
